CrashPlan 3.0.3 Update Features Deduplication Enhancements

Tonight we released version 3.0.3 of CrashPlan via automatic update. If you’re already a CrashPlan user, you’ll have the newer version the next time you launch the application.

A Buried Gem

Along with a host of minor tweaks and bug-fixes, version 3.0.3 includes a significant performance upgrade to CrashPlan’s core deduplication engine. Deduplication is the technique of examining a file’s content, down to the block level, to determine which parts of it have changed since the last backup. This is what enables CrashPlan to upload just the parts of a file that have actually changed, saving huge amounts of time and storage space. One of the challenges of deduplication is that it requires the computer to do a lot of calculations to actually determine what’s changed. The ‘under the hood’ improvements we introduced in version 3.0.3 have increased the performance of the dededuplication engine by a factor of 3-5x. This translates to lower load on your processor, and increased backup speed in most situations.

Sophisticated data deduplication is one of the things that sets CrashPlan apart from other backup systems. And now with the advancements we’ve incorporated in version 3.0.3, the advantage is even greater.